A. L. Buehrer What I Write and Why

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

A Hand with Five Fingers

Yesterday I embarked on what is to be my seventh novel. Though I've written two trilogies, (the soon-to-be-available Stardrift and the more recent Rhapsody and Threnody) this new book is going to be my first stand-alone novel.A Hand with Five Fingers begins with the sentence, "It had been one of those dark days." First sentences, you know, are highly important, almost as important as final sentences. So the story goes, our protagonist, an author, is driving home from another discouraging consultation with her literary agent and almost hits a kid crossing the road in the middle of a bleak and lonely moor. The unidentifiable foreign teenager eventually reveals to her that he is a half-remembered concert pianist...one-hundred twenty-eight years dead.
So, that's the premise. The pianist, is a real person whom I've been researching extensively in my spare time. Franz Liszt was a Hungarian piano virtuoso, conductor, and composer during the early-to-mid Romantic period. For some reason I got inspired and started to base characters and drawings off of him.

Actually, Franz Liszt's influence on my work can be seen as far back as Stardrift, where a character named Wyvhern Earafanhisk was based roughly on him, physically. My character's hair is actually about six inches longer though. Men should have long hair. They really should.
Anyway, in my upcoming book, there are actually no less than three characters that are meant to resemble him. It's quite strategic on my part, actually. I'll warn you that the plot is just border-lying creepy. You probably couldn't expect less from a book called A Hand with Five Fingers.
(But A Hand with Six Fingers would be creepier. Sequel? :)